Overivew
The Maryland Community Solar pilot has been running for 7 years and culminates in 2024. The program incetivizes developers to provide serivces to LMI customers. LMI qualification is defined for both the Low and Moderate income portions:
- Low income means a subscriber whose gross annual household income is at or below 175 percent of the federal poverty level for the year of subscription or who is certified as eligible for any federal, state, or local assistance program that limits participation to households whose income is at or below 175 percent of the federal poverty limit.
- Moderate income means a subscriber whose gross annual household income is at or below 80 percent of the median income for Maryland for the year of subscription.
Utility Map
We consider five utilities in Maryland:
- Baltimore Gas and Electric
- Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative
- Delmarva Power
- Potomac Electric (Pepco)
- Potomac Edison
The map shows the distribution of five utilities coverage across the state.
The table below shows each of the five utilities in Maryland and the respective demographic data attribute, including population, households and data representing Low and Moderate income distributions. The largest utility in the state in terms of population and households is BGE. In terms of low and moderate income concentrations, BGE and Delmarva hold the highest concentration of the respective populations.
Geoqualification
Geoqualification is only available for Low income, which removes the Moderate income portion. We calculate the number of households living at or below 175 percent of the federal poverty line in Maryland, and tag the number of households to each of the Maryland utilities. This represents the ‘Low Income’ layer in the map below.
To estimate the potential population qualified as LMI in Maryland, we calculate the number of households living at or below 80% AMI. This layer is added as ‘Moderate Income’.
Market Saturation
Community Solar
We use two sources to estimate the number of community solar projects in Maryland: LIFT Solar database by Groundswell and the NREL Sharing the Sun database. Geospatial data is available for the LIFT database and is visualized below.
LIFT Map
The table below shows the total project capacity in MW AC by utility zone for both the LIFT and NREL datasets. Additionally, the LIFT dataset includes estimated number of LMI subscribers for the existing projects. According to the LIFT dataset, there are currently 32 community solar projects in Maryland represent 51.5 MW AC. The NREL dataset shows almost double the capacity, particularly for BGE and PEPCO utility zones.
Residential Solar
We aggregate data made available in the NREL report ‘Rooftop Photovoltaic Technical Potential in the United States’. This data is broken into two sections, Rooftop with Lidar Coverage and Suitable Small Buildings.
Rooftop with Lidar Coverage
The below table shows the number of buildings that are defined as potential solar adopters, defined by at least 10 square meters of potential roof space. Only zip codes that are covered by Lidar are available, meaning that much of the state is not covered. The next section shows a modeled approach to estimate the number of small buildings in particular that are potential for solar adoption. This data is separated into small, medium, and large buildings. A small building is less than 5,000 square feet, a medium building is between 5,000 and 25,000 square feet, and a large building is greater than 25,000 square feet.
Suitable Small Buildings
The next dataset was estimated by NREL authors using modeling techniques for each zip code in the United States. We overlay the small building suitability dataset, defined by buildings less than 5,000 square feet, with our Maryland utility zones.